Screening airport passengers is a massive logistical endeavor, but it is also a psychological challenge. One of the enemies is “search satisfaction”: People hunting for irregularities — whether a radiologist looking at a chest x-ray or a TSA screener — tend to stop looking as soon as they find one thing they’re on the hunt for. In his Review cover story, Kip Hawley, a former head of the TSA, describes an unsettling instance of this psychological tendency:

By the time of my arrival, the agency was focused almost entirely on finding prohibited items. Constant positive reinforcement on finding items like lighters had turned our checkpoint operations into an Easter-egg hunt. When we ran a test, putting dummy bomb components near lighters in bags at checkpoints, officers caught the lighters, not the bomb parts.

When the screeners saw the lighters, they decided, subliminally or explicitly, that the terms of the search had been satisfied, and stopped looking. That tendency helps to explain why expanding a list of banned items, even if some of them are moderately dangerous, doesn’t make us safer. The battle against terrorism, Hawley’s anecdote makes clear, has to include vigilance against our own psychological quirks.

(Some research suggests that video gamers might make good TSA agents: Gamers are well-trained in scanning scenes on a video screen for danger and for pieces of puzzles; and they learn not to succumb to search satisfaction: Even if you’ve found one cache of ammunition in a first-person-shooter scenario, you quickly learn that there’s likely to be more elsewhere, hidden more cleverly.)

Biographies

Gary Rosen is the editor of Review and the former managing editor of Commentary magazine. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of "American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding" and the editor of "The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq."